David's Sling (29 page)
Leslie raised an eyebrow. "Fortunately, we don't need military aircraft. Even though commercial planes can't carry heavy military equipment, they
can
carry Hunters. We wouldn't normally involve MAC—except that MAC has commandeered every plane in the country, whether the military can use it or not."
I see. General Kelvin sat down at the terminal and worked at it for several minutes. "What next?" he asked.
"'Now we watch," Leslie replied. "Nathan rattles on from time to time about turning our plowshares into swords. We'll see it as it happens."
The display reflected traffic on StockNet, filtered through a query that eliminated every activity not directly related to the production of parts for the Sling Project. The first hit was with Cameron Corporation, for ten thousand HopperHunters. A similar order went to Lightcraft for ten thousand SkyHunters. Another order went to Space Platforms, Inc., for a thousand HighHunters.
From there, a two-way funnel opened ever wider. Cameron ordered fans, engines, and guns. LightCraft ordered motors, optical fibers, and solar cells. Space Platforms, Inc., ordered nose cones, ceramic tail fins, and liquid oxygen tanks. Everyone ordered microprocessors and optical sensor clusters.
The funnel reached farther and wider. To build those parts, the suppliers for Cameron, LightCraft, and Space Platforms needed other things: wiring, connectors, spark plugs, tubing.
The funnel opened on a flood: Those suppliers, in turn, needed raw plastics, structural metal shapes, glass, rubber, titanium, silicon putty.
By morning light, orders for ore had been issued by refineries, to supply the foundries, to supply the small-parts manufacturers, to supply the large-parts manufacturers, to supply the subassemblers, to supply the assemblers as the originally stockpiled assemblies were consumed.
Hiccups appeared. A cutting tool company fell behind, and sent out orders for replacement parts for its lathes and milling machines. Meanwhile, the operators of the Sling network—men and women of Garrett Technologies whom Leslie has gotten out of bed to help—intervened to spill the overload onto other cutting tool plants.
A graphite-epoxy chemical stream broke down. Another laminate-mixing facility was reprogrammed; the stream continued.
As money and orders had flowed down through the nerve system of the nation, now equipment and materials— thousands of tons of it—flowed upward. This upward flow convulsed the continent in a manner that the money and orders, flying with the speed of electricity through the humming networks of cable and satellite link, had not.
The material flow required more than mere communication. This convulsion required trucks, vans, aircraft, and railroad cars, for anything that could transport an engine mount or a load of ball bearings from a factory. Another spasm of orders shot across the nation, for truck drivers and switch operators and pilots, to pump the blood back through the nation's arteries.
And the convulsion of the transport system had its own spinoffs—new requirements for fuel, for oil filters, for turbine rotors. And this had yet more spinoffs—so numerous, so pervasive, that even the StockNet computers could not track them in real time.
By lunch time, over half a billion dollars had passed through the Sling Project—from the tip of the funnel down, to touch over five million people. And tons of materials pushed upwards to the tip of the funnel—to Cameron, to LightCraft, to Space Platforms. The first dozen production Hoppers spun off the line, into a grueling—but short—quality assurance test. One was rejected.
By evening, the routes of hundreds of airplanes had been bent into an arc that soared from continent to continent. Much of this arc already stood prepared to carry men and machines of the regular Army, but now the routes changed subtly; the cargoes changed drastically.
By midnight, the first SkyHunters lifted into the skies of Germany. The first HopperHunters floated from their crates, to whir on the edge of the battle zone. By midnight, the greatest engine of creative production in human history—the American economy—had transformed itself into an instrument of war.
Of course, midnight is relative. By the time midnight swept softly into Yakima, the gray skies of Germany had already passed through the gunpowder-stained birth pains of dawn, into morning.
May 1
The purpose in conflict is not to destroy your opponent, but to disarm him.
—Zetetic Commentaries
Ivan stared stonily at the tom bodies of a farmer, his wife, and his two children, without thinking. They were Germans, he reminded himself.
Germans. All his life he had read about and heard about the Germans. Germans were monsters—the builders of Auschwitz and Dachau—murderers on a massive scale. Occasionally, during the lessons and the lectures and the broadcasts, he considered the anomaly that most of Germany's crimes—and all their true atrocities—had occurred over half a century earlier. But the thought always faded quickly, a delicate snowflake in the burning horror of the slaughter they had committed. Usually, Ivan wondered why the Allies hadn't simply exterminated all the Germans right after the war. It seemed justifiable to annihilate creatures that showed such a thirst for annihilation themselves.
Smoke blew past, carrying the stench of charred flesh. The farmhouse and its inhabitants had been in the center of an assault exploitation path. Before sending the tanks and the personnel carriers through, the Soviets had carpeted the route with artillery fire to kill the silly German soldiers with their silly handheld antitank missiles. In the opening days of the battle, many men had cooked to death in the armored confines of their vehicles as German and American soldiers skewered them with a plethora of rockets and missiles.
But the Russian artillerymen grew proficient at tiling the areas of advance with suppressive fires. The German foot soldiers with launchers had died. The problem had disappeared. Of course, the improved effectiveness in killing scattered soldiers had improved their effectiveness in killing farmers, too.
Ivan's jeep drove on, but he could not escape the image of the farmer's remains. Part of his mind remembered that the farmer and his family were Germans, but another part—the rational part of his mind, he now realized— whispered that they were people little different from the farmers outside of Kursk. And no part of his mind could think of German children as Germans. German children were just children.
He clenched his teeth. Mother of Russia, they were just children! How could his leaders justify this murder?
The 20th Guards Tank Army had crushed the German II Corps several days ago, but rumors said that remnants of the American VII Corps had reorganized here outside Stuttgart.
Baffled admiration shook Ivan when he thought about the Americans. Why did they fight with such ferocity? The Germans he could understand; they fought for survival. But the Americans? Why did they insist on fighting as heroes? He sighed, guilt-ridden at his own thoughts. If he felt horror at the execution of the Germans, whom he hated, how would he feel about killing Americans, whom he merely disliked? Well, they at least were combatants, not children. He shrugged.
The sound of heavy artillery grew loud, then vibrant as the earth shook with its violence. Ivan recognized a nearby ridge as the vantage point he had been told to capture.
His lonely introspection faded, and his thoughts shifted to his mission, to the troops he now commanded. He wrenched the radio handset from its socket. "Lieutenant Svetlanov, deploy your men along the left crest. Katsobashvili, center. Dig in—the rim is shallow there, and you'll take the brunt if the Americans try to outflank our armor. Krantz, you're to the right." Ivan still wasn't quite sure how he had wound up as commander of an infantry battalion. He was a scientist, dammit, not a soldier. But the casualties on the first few days had left a desperate need for officers, and he was an officer.
What he was
not
was a leader. He lacked the charisma. But as a scholar, he had a strong grasp of the theories of warfare, and he was realistic enough to recognize and be wary of situations where pragmatic experience, not theory, gave the solution.
He nodded to his jeep driver, Goga, and they bounced over the rocks and craters to the left flank of the crest, pulled up next to Svetlanov's jeep, and stepped out. With a few long strides, Ivan reached the edge of the crest, to peer out into the main battle area. The sound of artillery turned deafening here, beyond the protection of the earthen lip. Down below was a vision of Hell.
Through the gunpowder haze, Ivan could see Major Shulgins armor charge through the valley, oblivious to the hail of Soviet shells through which they coursed. To the far, far left, a clutch of American tanks huddled behind whatever cover they could get, while to the right of Shulgin s formation, a smaller group of tanks—possibly Abrams tanks, he couldn't tell for sure—were entrenched in massive bunkers. Though the entrenched tanks were few, they would be harder to take out than the tank force at the far left.
None of the Americans paid attention to the artillery, any more than did the Russians. Save for a minuscule chance of a direct hit, neither American nor Soviet artillery posed any threat to armor; its sole purpose was to kill exposed infantrymen—men such as those Ivan now commanded. Ivan thanked the fates that the artillery pounding the battlefield was Russian, not American. He would have already died had those fires been directed at his position.
Ivan could see—and hear, on the jeep radio that his driver now cranked to full volume—Shulgin shifting his forces to crush the more distant enemy first, before sweeping around to encircle the entrenched position. Ivan pulled out his binoculars to search the center of the overall American formation. Oddly, there was no one there.
And then there was someone there. Or something. Three machines that looked like inverted cupcakes whirred forward from behind the wreckage of a small brick house. The machines moved so smoothly over the tortured pastureland, they seemed to ride on air. Focusing his binoculars, Ivan realized that they
were
riding on air. Hovercraft! He noticed that they skittered when a shell exploded nearby, but they apparently had enough armor to deflect shrapnel.
Ivan listened to the Soviet chatter. "Commander, we have three targets bearing center."
"Teymuraz, right flank, hit those targets." Six Soviet tanks peeled off to face the attacking hovercraft—the Americans were
attacking
, despite the overwhelming odds!—but even as they peeled, the odd vehicles zipped amongst the Soviet tanks. Mother of Russia—those hovercraft could fly! One of them swiveled, and the tank nearest it exploded. Ivan thought it was Teymuraz's tank, the leader of the six-tank combat group.
Shulgin didn't know what had happened yet. He had other fish in his skillet. "Anatolii, center lead," he roared. "Kiril, cover left. Hit the two M60s at—" Ivan heard the beginnings of an explosion on the receiver, then silence. The Americans had killed Shulgin!
A handful of Soviet tanks hurtled along at the forefront of the Soviet formation, moment by moment separating themselves from the main group. Had Shulgin still been there, he would have brought them back into line. But now the Americans started moving, swinging to get clear shots at the vulnerable side armor of the newly separated strays. Ivan stood up. "Bring me the radio!" he cried. Someone had to take control before things got out of hand. There were ninety Soviet tanks down there—enough to win this battle, even if they fought with no more discipline than a mob. But the casualties would be terrific without leadership.
Goga ran up, panting, with the bulky, ancient radio. Ivan thumbed the transmitter. "This is Major Ivan Vorontsov, he yelled into the handset. "Major Shulgin has been killed. I will take command." He steadied his binoculars on the leader of the strays. "Tank YZ4, stop your group. Wait for ADLT to come up on your flank. "
A voice he didn't recognize came up. "Who are you?" the voice demanded.
"This is Major Vorontsov, commander of the 4-35 Infantry battalion. Obey me! Major Shulgin is dead."
There was a moment of silence, then the voice began again. "I think it's an American," the voice said. "Disregard the—" the voice ended in a sickening thump, the same sound that had accompanied Shulgin's death.
The Americans had outflanked the Soviet lead tanks. The Russians were quickly destroyed by tightly coordinated fire. Ivan had an idea. "Lieutenant Kondrashin, this is Vorontsov. Can you recognize my voice?"
The pause seemed to last a lifetime. Ivan looked at the five remaining tanks of the group Shulgin had sent to destroy the hovercraft. They had stopped in the middle of the battlefield, uncertain what to do now that their quarry had passed them. At last Kondrashin's voice spoke up. "Yes, Major Vorontsov. "
"Everyone stop!" Ivan screamed. They stopped, some grudgingly, to conform with the others rather than in prompt obedience to the disembodied radio voice.
Ivan surveyed the situation—quickly, quickly, a tank that stops in the open is a dead tank—"L23Z, bear left with your group. All tanks forward at 10 miles per hour. RTY7, accelerate to 15 mph, to circle. Americans are veering left. I repeat, left." Had Ivan's comrades not taken his orders, they would already be passing to the right of the American edge. They would be taking the same beating that had already killed their eager front line.
He could already foresee the next American step: the Abrams tanks in the bunkers would come up from behind. He had to divert them. He switched his radio to the artillery net. "This is Major Vorontsov. Move your suppressive fires 1 kilometer south."
There was another long, hysterical discussion as Ivan persuaded the artillery support personnel to take his orders. At last, however, the fires moved away from the woodland to the north of the Abrams position. "Lieutenant Katsobashvili, take companies B and C down into the woods, and attack the American position," he pointed at the partly concealed tanks, "there."
"Yes, sir."
"I'm sure there are American infantry there. You will have quite a firefight before taking that position, but you must succeed."
"Yes, sir." The lieutenant hurried away. Troops began moving slowly over the crest.
Too late. The small group of Abrams tanks on Shulgin's right flank moved slowly out of their shelters, then charged with ever-increasing speed toward the rear of the Soviet tank formation. And the main group of Americans was moving again, retreating, giving the Abrams time. The Soviet formation, meanwhile, was breaking up again as it moved. The two hovercraft continued to skitter through their ranks, killing tanks seemingly at random. But those random tanks always coincidentally blocked the movements of others. Long lines of stragglers formed.
Suddenly, Ivan remembered that there had been three hovercraft at the beginning. Now there were only two. What had happened to the third one?
One of his men shouted, and started firing his Kalashnikov. Ivan tore away his binoculars and saw the third hovercraft, breezing up the hill straight toward him. "Kill that thing!" he shouted, pointing with his right arm.
An extraordinary force threw him backwards to the ground. Pain exploded through his right shoulder. The crack of a bullet's sonic boom deafened him. Goga stared down at him in horror.
Ivan lay there, numb with shock, watching his driver's face. It seemed almost amusing—that face, the wide, terrified eyes. Ivan concentrated on that face because the numbness that replaced the pain in his shoulder scared him. It made him suspect that his arm might no longer be attached there. He watched Goga's face with the greatest concentration.
Goga looked up, and his terror exploded. With a choked scream, he dived toward the jeep, sliding the last meter to get behind it. Ivan felt a blast of air behind his head. The roar of jet fans penetrated his deafened ears. A glint of metal crept up on the corner of his vision. The American hovercraft floated beside him.
Ivan's mind fragmented. One fragment screamed in pain. Another fragment panicked with the suspicion that he had lost his arm.
A third mental fragment trembled in terror of the machine that had shot him—the machine that would now kill him.
But one fragment watched the hovercraft, recording and analyzing. This fragment felt a touch of awe.
The hovercraft must be a robot; it was too small, too oddly shaped, to contain a person. It unerringly singled out those who showed initiative and destroyed them. It wasted no fire on mere soldiers, the poor lumps of meat sent to die. Goga could have come out and danced before it without fear, rather than quivering behind the futile protection of the jeep.
Out of curiosity, Ivan moved his left hand toward his grenade belt. The roar of the fans changed pitch, the hovercraft swirled, and a strange, seven-barrel gun stared at him. He recognized the weapon: it was an American ultra-high-velocity gatling gun that fired armor-piercing uranium-depleted bullets, used for killing tanks. It took Ivan a moment to notice a much smaller machine gun adjacent to the seven massive barrels; as he was still alive, that was surely the weapon that had taken his arm.
Ivan considered reaching for a grenade. Earlier in his life, he would have thought that reaching for the grenade was the brave thing to do. But he had already proved his bravery. He had proved it with the handful of words he had written above his signature in the cold lands of Siberia. He didn't need to prove himself.
He
did
have to get word of this amazing machine home. Surely it was a new, secret weapon, or he would have heard of it before. He had to find a way to counter it.
One oddity of this machine puzzled him as he lay there in a pool of blood and pain. Why did it sit over him as if watching patiently for life? Why didn't it kill him?
Lila watched the broadcast from the HopperHunter with terrified eyes. Nathan watched her and listened to her short breaths. Nathan felt the horror himself, the thickness in his mind that wanted to deny this scene any reality beyond the flat panel display. Kurt's face showed the concentration of a trapeze artist—a dynamic equilibrium of horror and hatred, both submerged beneath the overriding engineering need to diagnose the events. The others had retreated—some across the room, some within themselves.
A jet of blood spurted from the Russian's chest. Only lines of pain put expression on his dead white skin. He might once have have been a gardener, or a chess player, or a writer.